It's hard to believe this safety video is now about ten years old. One of the most fun and recognizable projects I got to work on at Wildbrain. I was lead animator on this project and was tasked with coming up with a workflow of how to animate the hand-drawn character layouts provided by Gordon Clark and Nick Hewitt within a rather tight turnaround. We came upon this Blur music video by Shynola and were impressed by of the bendy puppetting they were able to pull off.
Turns out they made this with Maya. Instead of going that route, I took a crash course in Anime Studio Pro (now known as Moho) to pull together some quick animations tests. It turned out to be a perfect workflow. This was before the age of After Effects puppet pin tools. We continued using Anime Studio Pro for many projects at Wildbrain, including this video advertising the in-flight Wifi. These projects were animated by myself, Tim Blair, and Sara Dicken.
I built Richard Branson using the layers and the vector tools in Anime Studio Pro and did all of the rigging and animated all of the close-up shots of him. I built a pose library of his head at different angles that I would paste into the timeline and massage the interpolations. Some of this process lead to my understanding of a need for head rigging tools in 2-D software, which eventually lead to the creation of Joysticks 'n Sliders.